In recent years the retail soft ice cream stands have lost a tremendous amount of business to newly starting up hard ice cream retail stands and to super-market sales of packaged factory mixed flavored hard ice cream.
This is partly because the factory mixed ice cream has been sold in an increasingly great variety of flavors even as many as thirty-one flavors with admixed ingredients such as nuts, chocolate chips, candies, fruits and cookie chips.
The usffering retail soft ice cream stands have had mixers with which to mix such ingredients into their own soft products, but such mixers have not been efficient enough to provide a sufficiently speedy mixing. This causes excessive labor cost overhead and long customer "waits" during the slow mixing. So soft ice cream stands have not been able to offer the great variety of ingredients that factory mixing has offered.
An objective hereof is to provide a patron of a soft ice cream stand with the privelege of being his own "ice cream chef," placing an order for a product containing ingredients from a generous list as made affordable by the new low labor cost speedy mixing hereof.
Another objective is to provide an efficient mixer useful with ice cream of any butterfat content, low or high.
The public will like the economic possibilities hereof:
(1) The best ice cream is fresh from the freezer, much superior in flavor to ice cream factory made and stored. PA0 (2) Such fresh "soft serve" ice cream is also less cold than hard package ice cream and hence is easier on the taste buds.
This invention is in the field of mixing heads for mixers or blenders. In the prior art, a superior mixing head has been greatly needed so as to provide good mixing using thick ice cream or ice milk at low initial mixing head cost and with good paper cup protection.
The public desires an ice cream product of great consistency so as to stand up well on an ice cream cone. The most healthy kind of product is a product with low butter fat, such as is popularly known as "soft-serve". Heretofore it has not been practical to mix nuts, chocolate chips, or candies into "soft serve" ice cream.
The problem is that if one of the popular types of mixers is used, operating at 18,000 RPM, the common mixing head tends to cavitate, meaning that the mixing head makes its own cavity in the ice cream and then no more mixing occurs because such a mixing head simply spins in its own cavity.
It is an object of this invention, therefore, to provide a mixing head with blades with a large offset which will move the ice cream and thereby providing a good mixing of the products.
Another object is to provide a mixing head which will accomplish this good mixing while being rotated t far lesser speed, such as 250 RPM. The advantage is that the sides of a paper cup will not be cut by the slower blades in ordinary use, which is a problem common to the high-speed mixers used at ice cream stands today.
In the prior art retail "soft-serve" ice cream stands, flavor could not be added after the ice cream is taken from the freezer and maintain good consistency because there has been no adequate way of blending the flavor with the small equipment used at retail level compared to large factory-mixed ice cream because excessive amounts of time have been needed for the mixing. Time becomes increasingly important with rising labor costs.
For these various reasons, soft-serve ice cream stands have served only flavors already in their machine, usually vanilla or chocolate.
An important distinction must be made between factory-made ice cream in which the mixing is easily done because the ice cream is much more fluid, being at a temperature of about 26 degrees Fahrenheit. This is contrasted with the material coming out of a soft-serve machine which is much colder and more thick, being about 18-20 degrees Fahrenheit. Being more thick, it is hard to blend ingredients into it. It is important to realize that the product of a retail soft-serve machine is generally immediately consumed. For these reasons, customers at soft-serve stands have not had the privilege which is the object of this invention to provide, namely, the privilege of being able to order any special flavor that he might desire fresh from the soft-server, because even the small ice cream stand, with this invention for blending thoroughly, would be fast enough to compete with other stands that have only hard frozen ice cream blended at a factory. The reduced total time using the head hereof makes this personalized custom-blending affordable even at today's high labor costs.
Safety is also important. In the prior art, when an operator's finger accidentally comes in contact with a side of a rotating mixing head, the finger can be injured.
An object of this invention, therefore, is to provide a mixing head having blades with rounded forward corners which will push an operator's finger away from the mixing head for greater safety.
A further object is to provide these same rounded corners so that the mixing head hereof, as compared to prior art heads, has a much reduced tendency to slice into sides of a paper ice cream cup, causing out-spillage of the product. This is important because cups and product are costly, and because the labor of cleaning soiled operator's clothes is also costly.
It is possible with thermoplastic injection-molding to make mixing heads of low-cost and of one-piece construction, but the tooling costs for such manufacture would be excessive.
It is an object hereof to provide a mixing head which can be made from one single blow of a punch press at a die cost of about $1,000, as compared with about a $10,000 die cost for plastic injection molding.
Another prior art problem with mixers rotating at 18,000 RPM is that the heat generated by friction, melts the ice cream so that it is not as thick as desired. It is, therefore, an objective hereof to provide a mixing head which can be rotated at much lower speeds, generating much less frictional heat.
Another disadvantage of such high-speed mixing heads having the cavitation problem and the slow mixing caused thereby is that a worker can be required to be involved in much human physical exertion in moving the ice cream cup up and down on the mixing head which, during working hours, is very tiring.
So it is an object hereof to provide superior mixing accomplished by the head itself, rather than human physical exertion.
An objective is to provide a head which speedily mixes many ingredients into soft-serve ice creams.
Ice cream mixers, for ice cream stand usage, customarily are provided with housing receiving the cup and so this invention is to be distinguished from mixers having no housings and not intended for paper cup reception at ice-cream stands.
Some prior art mixing heads have the tendency to throw an ingredient with great force, such as to throw a nugget of chocolate candy through the side of a paper cup, causing leakage. This is because such mixing heads rotate at very high speeds. It is an object hereof to eliminate this problem by providing a mixing head which will eliminate this problem by rotating at much lesser speed, such as at about 250 RPM.
The mixer hereof has a variable speed motor so that the RPM can be increased from 0 to 250 RPM level used for mixing and up to about 1800 RPM, as used after mixing and for the purpose of spinning the product off of the mixing head so that the mixer is substantially self-cleaning so that ingredients of a previous ice cream mixture need not be wiped off to prevent flavor carry-over and discoloring of a mixture later made.
Another objective is to make less work for the operator during mixing. Much less human movement of the cup with respect to the mixing head is required because of the greater stirring capability. This lesser reduced cup movement also further protects the cup from damaging contact with the mixing head.
An objective is to provide a mixing head having blades, the tips of which are bent into substantially horizontal position so that they would not tend to sharply abrade the bottom of the paper cup, to prevent it from becoming ruptured.
In the prior art, the most popular mixer used in retail mixing of individual servings has been a mixer of about one-seventh Horsepower and having a 3-speed selection at 18,000, 16,000 and 13,000 RPM.
An object hereof is to vastly reduce the speed so as to greatly reduce the potential damage that a high-speed head can do to a cardboard cup, since it has been discovered that the greater power and greater inclination or pitch of the blades of the present invention does not damage a cup as much as does great speed, and especially as does the combination of prior art great speed and cup-damaging mixing head shape.